


right over her heart

by orphan_account



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Angst, Blood and Injury, Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-02
Updated: 2017-04-02
Packaged: 2018-10-14 03:42:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10528185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: She knows it’s not true, but it feels like men come to Bastogne to die.





	

**Author's Note:**

> soo after 3+ years of crying over hbowar i finally did something about it. this is solely based upon the hbo war series and nothing else. sorry for any typos. the title is from a quote taken from six gun snow white by catherynne m. valente.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She knows it’s not true, but it feels like men come to Bastogne to die.

Once, there wasn’t a war. Once, there was a time between this war and the one before it, when the world starved but still maintained its tentative hold on peacetime. Once, there was a time before that, but she wasn’t alive for that, so she can’t very well say if peacetime is just a name people used back then to describe times where people only ever killed each other in ways that weren’t sanctioned by the threat of extinction—and, even then, it was blurry there. She admits she can’t remember much of _before_ , and that imagining what might come _after_ is even harder. There are children in the world who will be born into it and know nothing else, and, though she isn’t one of them, it feels like she might as well be.

War does that to a person, she realized long ago, and worse.

Renée doesn’t remember what it was like. She’s somewhere between too young to have seen so much and so old that, when she takes a step across floorboards dusty with familial disuse while scavenging for medical supplies, she’s convinced her limbs are the ones creaking, not the splintered wood. She’s somewhere between too close and not enough, whatever that’s good for. Whatever that means.

She doesn’t pray anymore. She’s not even sure she used to, back when the horrors of war still felt fresh and new and terrible to her; now it’s this redundant sense of helplessness, this bleak, deep despair that seemed to settle into her; now all she feels is bone-tired, something she wishes only went skin-deep.

Her hands are stained in blood. Whose it is, she doesn’t know—she never will—and no matter how many times her hands are dipped in water, scrubbed raw till her knuckles split in protest, she can’t get the blood off. It’s under her nails, in the creases of her palms, dried in the bend of her elbow, somehow. When the war first started, she’d thought the worst thing she’d come across was the hazy, heavy odor of gunpowder, cigarettes, and unwashed bodies. That was before the blood. Now all she can smell is blood on winter on gunpowder on cigarettes on death.

Bastogne isn’t a place people live in, not anymore. It’s a mass grave, a place where soldiers and civilians come to die in. She presses her palm to a series of cheeks and foreheads, whispers softly to them, hoping they can’t understand her when she whispers to them in French, when she tells them she’s sorry that all she can do is settle the war-torn look the violence has instilled in these men. The other nurses, the medics, the wounded, and the dying think she has a gift. There’s a man who speaks a lilting kind of French all the way from Louisiana says so. She can soothe a man’s sorrows if he’s near whole enough to console, if he’s conscious enough to register the light and the sympathy-love—the wishing that makes her yearn for a way to stop the dead from piling up and the wounded from crowding the halls—she ties to administer, like a balm, like it’s more than just a gesture.

Empathy has numbed and dulled her. It’s still there, but she knows that if she’s not careful, she’ll lose her heart this to the war. She’s seen her share of men—and medics, and nurses, and civilians—come in and out with something missing in them. Sometimes its whole chunks; sometimes they’re left staring off into nothing, silent like the dead; sometimes they scream until there’s no voice left in them; sometimes they just square their shoulders and go back, and those are dead men walking, she knows.

It comes down to this: she wipes their blood on her dress; saves who she can and comforts who she can’t; becomes use to the blood dried under her nails.

Sometimes, someone looks at her, and they look like they want to save her. The look never lasts for a moment, but it doesn’t change anything. The ration chocolate she gets is from men who press it into her hands once she bandages their wounds; hard candies—so rare, probably old, but still edible—are tossed her way. She rarely ever keeps them; it’s easier to give them to the men who come in and out of the aid station, to the ones who have to bide their time and wait to return to the line. Renée isn’t the one in need of saving. She’s here to _save_ , not to be saved, and that’s the end of it. There’s the blood of the dead she couldn’t save and those who died despite being able to return to the line from the aid station.

She thinks that, if there’s a way to save her—save her soul, and her hands, and her heart, after all of this is over—it’s through the end of the war. It’s seeing the end of war-torn bodies and blood, so much blood she grits her teeth against the tang in the air and the slick of it on her hands when she’s wrist-deep in a man, trying to stop the death from seeping into him. When the war is over, and she can leave the ruins of Bastogne behind, _then_ she thinks she might be saved then. That is, if God sees fit to give her that post-war peace—that is, if there’s peace to be met at the end of the war.

The sun comes up in the morning; it never stops snowing, and the cold never lets up. The blood on her hands is constant, rooting her to the floor of the church as she makes her rounds.

They come to Bastogne to die, Renée thinks, but there’s light, too. Fleeting and weak, sometimes, but it’s still there. It’s not from the sun. She can feel it under her skin; for the first time since the war started, she dreams of living somewhere far, far away from winter, where there’s a river her ghosts drown in, that she can wash her hands in; when she wakes, she can hear someone shouting her name. Well, not her name. But her body stiffens every time she hears the word, so it could be, in a world where people were nameless.

“Nurse! Nurse!”

Bastogne might as well be a graveyard, she thinks, but _she_ won’t be. Not forever. Not like this. Not how the war wants her to be. It’s a slip of a thought that wants to fade, but she holds onto it like a rosary, like the end of a rope; despite the bone-deep weariness settling across her shoulders again, she grabs hold of it and pulls herself out of bed.

When she steps outside into the open air, the dawn is dusting the shrill blue of the winter sky gold and pink, softly, like a warm hand pressing against a freezing cheek. Her dream is already fading.

For the first time, the morning doesn’t bleed when the sun comes up. It’s like nothing she can remember seeing since the war started. Renée thinks, it must be something that came out of a dream, or a prayer.

Hope can do that to a person, she realizes, and worse.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
